‘A Was a Man, All in All

News coverage on NPR (no TV here in Pepperland) has been grave and respectful on this anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Something about the combination of emerging detail – new eyewitness accounts 40 years in? C’mon, it’s just silly, where have they been since 1963? – and the warm gust of assurance from on high that Oswald acted alone makes me want to look over my shoulder. I like a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. More, actually. But at least do a good job of it, fercyrinoutloud.

For the record, I was too young to remember the assassination, although I have a primordial memory of watching the funeral on a rented TV as a tyke. It might have been a different funeral, or the memory might be a “found” one. My family only rented TV for funerals and moonshots. My first numbing public loss was John Lennon.

“The Good Faith,” the play I’ve been rehearsing for the past month and change, opened on Thursday night. It went well. All the words got said in about the right order and only one chair fell over, and the chair wasn’t supposed to be on stage in the first place. (Damn chairs, can’t take ‘em anywhere.) Since then I’ve been more or less asleep, washing stress out of the system. You know that cartoon squiggle that hovers over Linus when he faints in the Peanuts strips? I’ve got my very own squiggle and it lives over my bed. Comes with the name.

I’m looking forward to tightening the piece up, my part of it at least. I’m not quite in my skin yet on stage, but it’s getting close. Hey, we’ve already lasted longer than some recent Broadway masterpieces, and we didn’t have the benefit of previews to close in. But we’ve lost Katarina the beauteous stage manager again (phoooey), which makes my nightly call so much less exciting.